“Our prince, in his infinite wisdom,” says Maher, following Omeir’s gaze, “has discovered a weakness. A flaw. Do you see where the river enters the city? Where the walls dip beside that gate? Water has been running there since the days of the Prophet, peace be upon Him, collecting, seeping, chewing away. The foundations there are weak, and the mitering of the stones has begun to fail. It is there that we will smash through.”
Up and down the city walls, sentry fires are being lit. Omeir tries to imagine swimming the moat, clambering over the scarp on the far side, somehow scaling the outer wall, fighting across the battlements, then dropping into a no-man’s-land before the huge bulwark of the inner wall, its towers as tall as twelve men. You would need wings; you would need to be a god.
“Tomorrow night,” says Maher. “Tomorrow night two of those houses will be ours.”
* * *
The following morning ablutions are made and prayers recited. Then flagbearers pick their way through the tents to the very front of the lines and raise bright standards in the dawn light. Drums and tambourines and castanets sound throughout the company, a racket meant as much to frighten as to inspire. Omeir and Maher watch the powder makers—many missing fingers, many with burns on their throats and faces—prepare the huge gun. Their expressions are strained from the constant fear of working with unstable explosives and they reek of sulfur and they murmur to one another in their strange dialect like necromancers, and Omeir prays that their eyes will not meet his, that if something goes wrong they will not blame the defect in his face.
Along the almost four miles of land wall, the cannons have been organized into fourteen batteries, none larger than the great bombard Omeir and Maher have helped drag here. More familiar siege weapons—trebuchets, slings, catapults—are loaded too, but all of them seem primitive compared to the burnished guns and the dark horses and carts and powder-stained tunics of the artillerymen. Bright spring clouds cruise above them like vessels sailing to a parallel war, and the sun pushes above the city’s rooftops, momentarily blinding the armies outside the walls, and finally, at some signal from the sultan, hidden by a shimmer of fabric atop his tower, the drums and cymbals go quiet and the flagbearers drop their standards.
At more than sixty cannons, cannoneers set tapers to priming powder. The whole army, from barefoot conscripted shepherds in the vanguard with clubs and scythes to the imams and viziers—from the attendants and grooms and cooks and arrowsmiths to the elite corps of Janissaries in their spotless white headdresses—watches. People inside the city watch too, in sporadic lines along the outer and inner walls: archers, horsemen, counter-sappers, monks, the curious and the incautious. Omeir shuts his eyes and clamps his forearms over his ears and feels the pressure build, feels the huge cannon draw up its abominable energy, and for an instant prays that he is asleep, that when he opens his eyes he’ll find himself at home, resting against the trunk of the half-hollow yew, waking from an immense dream.
One after another the bombards fire, white smoke ejecting forward from their barrels as the guns smash backward with the recoil, rocking the earth, and sixty-plus stone balls fly toward the city faster than eyes can track them.
Up and down the walls clouds of dust and pulverized stone rise. Fragments of brick and limestone rain onto men a quarter mile away, and a roar rolls through the assembled armies.
As the smoke drifts away, Omeir sees that a section of one tower in the outer wall has partially crumbled. Otherwise the walls appear unaffected. The gunners are pouring olive oil over the huge gun to cool it, and an officer prepares his crew to load a second thousand-pound ball, and Maher is blinking in disbelief, and it is a long time before the cheers subside enough for Omeir to hear the screaming.
Anna
She is chopping scavenged wood in the courtyard when the guns fire again, a dozen in succession, followed by the distant rumble of stonework falling to pieces. Days ago the thunder of the sultan’s war engines could start half of the women in the workshop weeping. This morning they merely sign crosses in the air over their boiled eggs. A jug wobbles on a shelf and Chryse reaches up and settles it.
Anna drags the wood into the scullery and builds up the fire and the eight embroideresses who are left eat and shuffle back upstairs to work. It’s cold and nobody sews with urgency. Kalaphates has fled with the gold, silver, and seed pearls, there’s not much silk left, and what clergymen are buying embroidered vestments anyway? Everyone seems to agree that the world will end soon and the only essential task is to cleanse the besmirchment from one’s soul before that day comes.